What it means to our safety every time we climb into a vehicle

Think for a moment about what you see when you're behind the wheel of your car.

Everything from the padding on the dashboard to the thickness of the windshield is designed to help keep you alive in the event of a crash. That knowledge comes from experiments and crash tests conducted on crash test dummies. Whether we like to think about it or not, the crash tests often are conducted on human cadavers.

Because engineers and designers need to know exactly what it takes to injure every major organ and bone in our bodies and try to design vehicles to protect us from those forces.

The first place to ever conduct cadaver testing was Wayne State University in Detroit. Its Bioengineering Center has studied impact biomechanics since 1939.

We wanted to learn more about this research and what it means to our safety every time we climb into a vehicle.

We're joined by Albert King, who is a distinguished professor in biomedical engineering at Wayne State.